Articles in category: Sourcing : ITO

Banking has changed since the global financial crisis in 2008. The steady increase in regulations from Washington, the states and international organizations are now impacting IT leaders. As regulators examine vendor relationships and outsourcing arrangements more closely, there is a significant risk that poorly managed IT could trigger an audit finding, a fine or negative publicity. As IT leaders plan to review and renew IT service providers in 2016, here are some of the risks to manage.

IT leaders continue to focus on cost containment with their IT service deals, but in today’s business environment companies will have to spend money to save money and also deliver the new capabilities their enterprises expect from IT, whether that means migrating applications to the cloud, introducing new automation or robotic capabilities, or partnering with IT service providers to deliver business outcomes.

IT and business process outsourcing deals have been getting smaller in dollar value and shorter in duration for some time. And, according to analysis of 2015’s deal activity, enterprise digitization is strengthening that trend. The number of outsourcing contracts signed last year hit an all-time high, but annual contract values were down 8 percent, according to outsourcing consultancy Information Services Group (ISG).

IT vendor relationships are most successful when overseen by strong governance programs that effectively leverage contractual terms, conditions and functional requirements. By implementing specific governance practices and committees, enterprises can ensure proper escalation and handling of issues as well as ensure accurate service level measurement, financial credit application and review of operational reports. Upon contract signature, these enterprises need to implement a formal governance program together with the vendor, and the two parties should formally maintain that program throughout the entire contract term.

According to AT Kearney’s 2016 Global Services Location Index, robotics process automation and business process as a service could change the outsourcing industry, benefiting Asean countries. The global outsourcing industry is set for a major disruption so severe that it could change the face – as well as the players – of the industry, with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) region set to benefit.

Merger and acquisition deal announcements hit an all-time high of in 2015, from Anthem and Cigna to EMC and Dell. And experts expect robust M&A activity this year. But just as major mergers lead to major integration efforts for IT, they also spell significant work around outsourcing arrangements. In fact, the selling company is typically responsible for negotiating new sourcing services agreements before a divestiture is complete.

Outsourcing is an integral part of today’s work culture. Companies across a wide range of sizes and industries are choosing to outsource some or all of their software development. As David Berry, CIO of Daymon says, outsourcing is no longer about saving money, but primarily about flexibility and getting to scale.

It’s no surprise that a majority of IT pros work more than 40 hours per week, but it’s interesting to learn that some are putting in significantly longer workweeks, according to new survey data from Spiceworks. Among 600 IT pros surveyed, 54% said they work more than 40 hours per week. At the high end of the overtime group, 18% of respondents said they work more than 60 hours per week, and 17% said they top 50 hours per week.

Support center ticket volumes have been increasing, and this may be good for job seekers. Nearly 65% of all organizations surveyed by HDI, an industry group, report that ticket volumes have increased in their organization. Only 10% reported a decrease, according to HDI's 2015 Support Center Practices & Salary Report. The survey is based on data collected from 803 technical support professionals. The leading explanation for gains in ticket volumes are new applications and systems, which was cited by 53% of respondents.

Digital transformation is the business goal du jour. And while the increased adoption of social, mobile, analytics, cloud, autonomics, robotics and Internet of Things technologies is creating tremendous opportunities for the enterprise, it’s also introducing new risk. Most notably, these emerging technologies are impacting on how IT organizations interact with their IT service providers.

Deciding what requirements should be included when purchasing enterprise software can be tricky. New enterprise software project risks are significantly reduced when the scope of the requirements are well matched to potential software on the market. To achieve that match, it is sometimes necessary to adjust the scope of the requirements.With appropriate communication, employee expectations of the new software are well matched to what the software actually delivers, which also improves user buy-in.

IT pros who don't take the time to lift their heads and assess the likely IT landscape five years out may be asking for career trouble. Because one fact is clear: Organizations of all stripes are increasingly moving IT infrastructure to the cloud. In fact, most IT pros who've pulled all- nighters, swapping in hard drives or upgrading systems while co-workers slept, probably won't recognize their offices' IT architecture - or the lack thereof - in five years.

Organisations are starting to use agile principles to reinvent the outsourcing selection process, with some excellent results. The Agile Manifesto, originally designed for software development, encourages collaborative, cross-disciplinary teams to move rapidly, prioritise working services over exhaustive documentation, and maintain flexibility to change. By adopting these principles, companies have an opportunity to extract much-needed value from an otherwise costly and time-consuming endeavour

Fully free and open-source software companies – with their LibreOffices and Hadoops and ClamAVs – give off a distinct whiff of technological savvy. After all, they’re skillful enough to not have to pay software licensing costs. But “free as in beer” isn’t really the point – huge numbers of corporate open-source users opt for paid commercial versions of open-source projects, for simplicity and support. And then there are all those various licenses that protect the openness of the software – GPL, Apache, Eclipse. But the good news is that, with very few exceptions, there aren’t many legal issues for the average ...

Through a series of competitive bidding processes, the GTA (Georgia Technology Authority) settled on IBM to handle its infrastructure computing and AT&T to oversee its managed network services, and has awarded many smaller contracts to other IT providers in the time since. The state's IT privatization initiative, known as Georgia Enterprise Technology Services, or GETS, is projected to save the state $181 million in costs over the 10-year life of the IBM and AT&T contracts, but Dean Johnson views those cost reductions almost as an incidental benefit. "Our goal was not to save money -- our goal was ...

ASEAN organizations are adopting storage infrastructures that are faster, more efficient, automated and centralized, as they seek better performance or return on investment. In particular, technologies such as hybrid flash arrays are growing in popularity, as is flash cache on servers, software-defined storage and storage automation, says Sandeep Bazaz, industry analyst for ICT at Frost & Sullivan Apac.

CIO.com again asked outsourcing observers to peer into their crystal balls. And if they're right, 2015 could be the year IT outsourcing gets business-focused, customers embrace standardization, sourcing decisions become fact-based, and the age-old RFP process gets some real competition. IT outsourcing experts tell CIO.com what to expect in the year ahead. If they're correct, 2015 could bring better business outcomes, billions in renegotiation, the end of the RFP, and -- wait for it -- cloud robots.

Many of the topics and discussions at the recent Open Networking User Group (ONUG) conference emphasized one very important shift in the networking industry: leading IT organizations are moving to a DevOps organizational structure and eliminating the traditional silos of server, storage and networking in favor of cloud centric, cross-functional teams. Moreover, these changes in IT organizational structure are having a significant impact on networking requirements (e.g.

As business needs—and the new technologies required to support them—evolve ever more rapidly, outsourcing contracts signed just a year or two ago are already getting stale. That’s why Mayer Brown business and sourcing technology partner Dan Masur is advising companies to revamp their outsourcing deals right now to not only access new options, but also to cut significant costs. “There have been dramatic changes in how services are delivered, and those continue to evolve.

The wind of change is blowing through the business process outsourcing (BPO) services industry. The days when technology simply supported a service provider’s delivery as an underlying platform are numbered. Instead, the focus is on technology as a key part of service delivery, not only supporting services but also delivering far-reaching efficiencies, enhancements, modernisation and business outcomes. We are already seeing examples of buyers doing this for themselves.

A managed services or fixed-fee outsourcing model for application development and maintenance can ultimately yield major savings for IT organizations that embrace it. A well-planned managed service delivery contract for application maintenance can yield a 25 to 45 percent cost reduction over staff augmentation in the first year alone, according Steven Kirz, managing director with outsourcing consultancy Pace Harmon, with many organizations seeing 50 to 75 percent savings after five years.

'Super-disrupted' is not a word I'm used to hearing, but I heard it a lot when talking to Chris Johnson, HP's general manager for storage in EMEA. He used it half-a-dozen times when ZDNet spoke to him recently, while expounding HP's view of the evolving storage market. Over the course of an hour Johnson spelled out HP's plan for storage, which could be summed up in one word: flash.

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